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February 2008

When I was a young GenX just out of graduate school, the problem with corporate environments was they were stultifyingly bureaucratic. Processes were in place, but if you followed them you'd run off the road. Suggest an improvement and be branded heretical (after all, sometimes you'd suggest Technology).

But the pay was commensurate with the power of the company. If you were doing BizDev and you called from DuPont, you got a meeting. And employees were paid a above-average in their industry, because, after all, DuPont wanted the best and the brightest.

Now, it's about gossip (viral marketing) and when a young
(inexperienced) person joins a hot company full of other young
(inexperienced) people, they get paid very little. In exchange,
they're associated with the virally-hyped brand of the company. They're allowed in
the club.

It's seductive, because those people are so darned *cheap* and they're well-educated and smart, so it seems like it's a good idea, doesn't it?

But what happens less and less is selection for people who are, what Michael Porter would call, "sophisticated and anticipatory." We now increasingly give strategic jobs to the financial elite, not people who are of the market the product will serve, nor those who are from the community who will be major consumers, nor those who have had to take on the responsibility of growing up and becoming independent adults in their 20's. Instead, those jobs go to young people, who on paper seem inexpensive....But they're not. There are obviously hidden costs in the form of poor ability to manage uncertainty.

One in a robust group could learn; an entire team of hyper-protected helicopter-parented youth have a high likelihood of being blindsided by reality and failing miserably.